Iwent back to the department and called Perry LaSalle at his office. His head secretary, who was an older woman, robin-breasted and blue-haired and educated at Millsaps College, told me he wasn't in. "Is this Mr. Robicheaux?" she said. "Yes," I said, expecting her to tell me where he was. But she didn't. "Do you expect him soon?" I asked. "I'm not quite sure," she replied. "Is he in court today?" I asked. "I really don't know." "Does it seem peculiar when a lawyer doesn't tell his secretary where he is or when he will be back in his office?" I said. "I'll make a note of your observation, Mr. Robicheaux, and pass it on to Mr. Perry. By the way, has anyone ever told you how charming your manner can be?" she said, and hung up. After lunch the forensic chemist with whom I had left the ex-soldier's paper coffee cup dropped by my office. He was an ascetic, lean man by the name of Mack Bertrand who wore seersucker slacks and bow ties and white shirts and bore a pleasant fragrance of pipe tobacco. He was a good crime scene investigator and seldom, if ever, made mistakes. "Those latents off the paper cup?" he said. "Yeah, what did you come up with?" I said expectantly. "Zero," he replied. "You mean my man has no criminal record?" "No record at all," he said. "Wait a minute, the guy who drank out of this cup was in the service. In Vietnam. Probably in a hospital as well. The V.A. must have something on him." "The cup was handled by three unknown persons. I assume it came from a takeout cafe or convenience store. We didn't get a match on any of the latents I sent through the pod. I don't know how else to put it. Sorry." He closed the door and walked away, his pipe stem crimped upside down in his mouth. I went after him and caught him at the end of the corridor. "Run it through again, Mack. It's a glitch," I said. "I already did. Simmer down. Take a couple of aspirin. Go fishing more often," he said. He started to grin, then gave it up and walked outside. I called Perry LaSalle's office again. "Has Perry come back?" I asked. "He's in a conference right now. Would you like for me to leave him another message?" his secretary said. "Don't bother. I'll catch him another time," I said. Then I signed out a cruiser and drove directly to Perry's office before he could get away from me. I sat on a sofa under his glass-encased Confederate battle flag and read a magazine for a half hour, then heard footsteps coming down the carpeted stairs and looked up into the faces of Sookie Motrie and two well-known operators of dockside casinos in New Orleans and Lake Charles. The two gamblers looked like a Mutt and Jeff team. One was big, lantern-jawed, stolid, with coarse skin and knuckles the size of quarters, whereas his friend was sawed-off, porcine, with a stomach that hung down like a curtain of wet cement, his voice loud, his Jersey accent like a sliver of glass in the ear. "That's the man who t'rew my shotgun in the water," Sookie said, and pointed at me. "Honest to God, t'rew it in the water. Like a drunk person." I rested my magazine across my knee and stared back at the three of them. "Word of caution about Sookie," I said. "About ten years ago he had to be pried out of a car wreck with the jaws of life. Three surgeons at Iberia General worked on him all night and saved his life. When he got the bill, he refused to pay it. A lawyer called him up and tried to appeal to his conscience. Sookie told him, 'I ain't worth ten thousand dollars and I ain't paying it.' It was the only time anyone around here remembered Sookie telling the truth about anything." "You're a police officer?" the shorter gambler said. "Sookie told you that?" I said, and laughed, then raised my magazine and began reading it again. But as I watched the three of them walk outside, all of them gazing with the innocuous interest of tourists at the trees and antebellum homes along the street, I knew that being clever with the emissaries of greed and profit was a poor form of Valium for the political reality of the state where I was born, namely, that absolutely everything around us was for sale. I went up the stairs to Perry's office. "You trying to bring casinos into Iberia Parish?" I said. "No, people here have voted it down," Perry answered from behind his desk. "Then why are those two characters in town?" "If it's any of your business, there are people in Lafayette who believe gaming revenues shouldn't go only to the parishes on the Texas border," he replied. "Gaming? That's a great word. You don't have any bottom, Perry. I was out to Ladice Hulin's place this morning. The same day Amanda Boudreau was murdered, you told Tee Bobby that Legion Guidry was his grandfather. He came home in a rage, put his sister in the car, then went to find Jimmy Dean Styles. But you knew all this from the jump. You're going to let Tee Bobby take the needle rather than see your family's dirty bedsheets hung on the wash line." He sat very still in the deep softness of his black leather chair. He wore a cream-colored suit and a sky-blue shirt, opened casually at the collar. His mouth was puckered, as though he had sucked the moisture out of it, the folds of flesh in his throat pronounced, his hands cupped slightly on his desk blotter, the heated intensityof his eyes focused no more than six inches in front of him. When he spoke, his vocal cords were a phlegmy knot. "For one reason or another, you seem to have a need to demean me whenever we meet," he said. "Obviously I can't discuss the case of a client with you, but since you've chosen to attack me personally on this gambling stuff, maybe I can offer you an explanation that will allow you to think better of me. Most of the hot-sauce companies use foreign imports now. We don't. We've never laid off an employee or evicted a tenant. That's our choice. But it's an expensive one." He looked up at me, his hands folded now, his posture and demeanor suggestive of the cleric he had once studied to be. "I don't have it all figured out yet, Perry. But I think the story is a lot dirtier than you're letting on," I said. He clicked the edges of a pad of Post-its across his thumb. Then he pitched the pad in the air and let it bounce on his desk. "You'd better go take care of your own and not worry so much about me," he said. "You want to take the corn bread out of your mouth?" "Your friend, the Elephant Man, Purcel, is it? He pulled Legion Guidry off a counter stool in Franklin this morning and threw him through a glass window. A seventy-four-year-old man. You two make quite a pair, Dave," he said.
I went back to the office and called the jail in St. Mary Parish and was told by a sheriffs deputy that Clete Purcel was in custody for disturbing the peace and destroying private property and would appear in court that afternoon. "No assault charges?" I asked. "The guy he tossed through a window didn't want to press charges," the deputy replied. "Did the guy give an explanation?" "He said it was a private argument. It wasn't no big deal," said the deputy. No big deal. Right. After work I drove to Clete's apartment. From the parking lot I saw him up on his balcony, above the swimming pool, in a Hawaiian shirt and faded jeans that bagged in the seat, grilling a steak, a can of beer balanced on the railing. "How's it hangin', noble mon?" he called, grinning through the smoke. I didn't reply. I went up the stairs two at a time and through his front door and across his living room toward the sliding glass doors that gave onto the balcony. He drank from his beer, his green eyes looking at me over the top of the can. "There's a problem?" he said. "You threw Legion Guidry through a window?" "He's lucky I didn't feed it to him." "He's going to come after you." "Good. I'll finish what I started this morning. You know what he did to Barbara in the western store?" "No, I don't." He told me about the scene in the store, Legion Guidry blowing his breath in Barbara's face while he crushed the bones in her hand. "He's setting you up, Clete. That's why he didn't file against you," I said. He forked his steak off the grill and slapped it on aplate. "I don't want to talk about it anymore. Get some bread and a Dr Pepper out of the icebox," he said. "What's eating you?" "Nothing. The world. My weight problem. What difference does it make?" "Clete?" "Barbara's shitcanning me. She says we're not a match. She says I deserve more than she can give me. I can't believe it. That's the same line I used when I broke it off with Big Tit Judy Lavelle." "When did she tell you this?" "A little while ago." "After you got out of jail for defending her?" "It's not her fault. My ex said I always smelled like dope and whores. The only person who won't accept what I am is me." He went into the kitchen with his steak and took a bottle of whiskey from the cabinet and poured three fingers in a glass. He glanced at me, then opened the icebox and tossed me a can of Dr Pepper. "Get t
hat look off your face. Everything is under control," he said. "You going to get drunk?" I asked. "Who knows? The evening is young." I blew out my breath. "You're going to try to make up with Zerelda Calucci, aren't you?" He drank his whiskey in one long swallow, his eyes watering slightly from the hit his stomach took. "Wow, the old giant killer never lets you down," he said.
That night I helped Batist in the bait shop, but I couldn't let go of Perry LaSalle's smug complacency. I picked upthe phone and called him at his home on Poinciana Island. "Just a footnote to our conversation this afternoon," I said. "Legion Guidry physically abused Barbara Shanahan in public. He called her a bitch and almost broke her hand. This is the woman you supposedly care about. In the meantime, you denigrate Clete Purcel for going after the guy who hurt her. In this case the guy is your client." "I didn't know this." My hand was squeezed tight around the phone receiver, another heated response already forming in my throat. But suddenly I was robbed of my anger. "You didn't know?" I said. "Legion did that to Barbara?" he said. "Yes, he did." He didn't reply and I thought the line had gone dead. "Perry?" "I apologize for saying what I did about Purcel. Is Barbara all right? I can't believe Legion did that. That rotten son of a bitch," he said.
On Saturday morning I called Clete's apartment, but there was no answer and his machine was turned off. I tried again Sunday morning, with the same result. That afternoon I hitched my outboard and trailer to the pickup and headed toward Bayou Benoit and stopped at Clete's apartment on the way. He was lying in a recliner by the pool like a beached whale, his body glowing with lotion and sunburn, a bottle of vodka and a tall glass filled with crushed ice and cherries by his elbow. "Where have you been?" I asked. "Me? Just messing around. You know how it is," he said. "You look very content. Relaxed. Free of tension." "Must be the weather," he said, smiling behind his sunglasses. "How's Zerelda?" "She said to tell you hello," he said. "I think you're about to run over a land mine." "I had a feeling you might say that." He slipped his sunglasses up on his head and gazed at my truck and boat in the parking lot. "We going fishing?" A half hour later I cut the engine on the outboard and we floated into a quiet stretch of cypress-dotted water on Bayou Benoit, our wake sliding through the tree trunks into the shore. There were stormheads in the south, but the sky was brassy overhead, the wind hot and smelling of salt and dead vegetation inside the trees. I clipped a rubber worm on my line and made a long, looping cast into a cove that was rimmed with floating algae. On the ride out to the landing Clete had tried to sustain his insouciant facade, refusing to be serious, his eyes crinkling whenever I showed concern about his reckless and self-destructive behavior. But now, in the dappled light of the trees, the thunder banging in the south, I could see shadows steal across his eyes when he thought I wasn't looking. "I'm right, you and Zerelda are an item again?" I said. "Yeah, you could call it that." "But you don't feel too good about it?" "Everything's copacetic there. That kid, Marvin Oates, was around yesterday, but Zerelda told him to take a hike." "What?" I said. "She finally got tired of wet-nursing him. She spent a whole day looking for him in the Iberville Project, then he showed up at the motor court drunk So yesterday she told him he should spend more time on his criminal justice studies or find some friends more his age." "You've got something on your mind, Cletus." "This character Legion Guidry," he said. Unconsciously he wiped his palms on his pants when he said the name. "When I dragged him off that counter stool, I could smell an odor on him. It was awful. It was like shit and burnt matches. I had to wash it off my hands." I reeled in my artificial worm and cast it against a hollow cypress trunk and let it sink through the algae to the bottom of the cove. He waited for me to say something, but I didn't. "What, I sound like I've finally become a wetbrain?" he said. I started to tell him about my experience breaking into Legion's house, but instead I opened the ice chest and took out two fried-oyster po'-boy sandwiches and handed one to him. "This is guaranteed to help you lose weight and make you younger at the same time," I said. "I smelled it, Dave. I swear. I wasn't drunk or hungover. This guy really bothers me," he said, his face conflicted with thoughts he couldn't resolve.
CHAPTER 26
Monday morning the sky was black, veined with lightning over the Gulf. Right after I checked into the department I went to see Barbara Shanahan in the prosecutor's office. She was dressed in a gray suit and white blouse, her face defensive and vaguely angry. "If you're here to talk about something of a personal nature, I'd rather we do that after business hours," she said. "I'm here about Amanda Boudreau." "Oh," she said, her face coloring slightly. "I want to pick up both Tee Bobby Hulin and Jimmy Dean Styles," I said. "What for?" ' "I think we can find out once and for all what happened to Amanda. But we have to keep Perry LaSalle away from Tee Bobby." She was standing behind her desk. She pushed a couple of pieces of paper around on her desk blotter with the ends of her fingers. "This office won't be party to any form of procedural illegality," she said. "You want the truth about what happened to that girl or not?" I asked. "You heard what I said." "Yeah, I did. It sounds a little self-serving, too." I saw the anger sharpen in her face and I changed my tone. "You need to be in the vicinity when Tee Bobby and Styles are interviewed." "All right," she replied. She stared out the window. The wind was blowing hard, bending the trees along the railway tracks, bouncing garbage cans through the streets. "You pissed off at me about Clete?" "He went to jail for you and you eighty-sixed him," I said. "He was talking about 'clipping' Legion Guidry. You think I want to see him in Angola over me? Why don't you give me a little goddamn credit?" she said. "Clete is hurt more easily and deeply than people think," I said. "Actually, I like you, Dave. You probably don't believe that, but I do. Why are you so cruel?" Her eyes were moist, the whites a light pink, as though they had been touched by iodine. Way to go, Robicheaux, I thought.
I went back to my office and called the number of the Boom Boom Room. "Is Jimmy Sty there?" I said. "He'll be here in a half hour. Who want to know?" a man's voice said. "It's okay. Tell him I'll see him tonight," I said. "Who see him tonight?" the voice asked. "He'll know," I said, and hung up. Then I called Ladice Hulin's number on Poinciana Island. "It's Dave Robicheaux, Ladice. Is Tee Bobby home?" I said. "He's still sleeping," she replied. "I'll talk with him later. Don't worry about it," I said. "Somet'ing going on?" she said. "I'll get back to you," I said, and eased the receiver down. I went down the corridor to the office of Kevin Dartez, the department plainclothes who worked Narcotics exclusively and bore a legendary grudge against pimps and dope dealers for the death of his sister. When I opened his office door, he was tilted back in his chair, talking on the phone while he squeezed a hand exerciser in his palm. "Maybe if you pulled your head out of your cheeks and did your job, we wouldn't be having this conversation," he said into the receiver, then quietly hung up. He had narrow bones in his face and jet-black hair that he oiled and combed straight back. His needle-nose cowboy boots and pencil-line mustache and wide red tie, a tiny pair of silver handcuffs pinned in the center, made me think of an early-twentieth-century lawman or perhaps a Los Vegas cardplayer of the kind you didn't cross. "You doin' okay, Dave?" he asked. "I want to flip Tee Bobby Hulin and I could use your help," I said. "I'm a little jammed up right now," he replied. "I skated on an assault beef against Jimmy Dean Styles in St. Martin Parish. I'd like you to bring him in and tell him you need some information for an Internal Affairs investigation. In other words, the department would still like to hang me out to dry." "Jimmy Sty again, huh? He's not one of my fans. Maybe you ought to use somebody he trusts," Dartez said. "You're straight up, Kev. Street people respect you." "You wouldn't try to twist my dials, would you?" "Not a chance." I opened a notebook to a page on which I had written down several tentative questions for Kevin Dartez to ask Styles and set the notebook on Dartez's desk. "It really doesn't matter what you specifically say to Styles. Just get him to talk about me and make sure it's on tape. Also bring up Helen Soileau." "Why Helen?" Dartez asked. "Styles called her a dyke to her face. I don't think he's qu
ite forgotten the reaction he got," I said. Dartez squeezed the hand exerciser in his palm. "When you want him in here?" he asked. "How about as soon as possible?" I replied.
Afew minutes later Helen Soileau and I got into a cruiser and drove toward Poinciana Island. "A bad storm building," she said, looking over the steering wheel at the blackness in the sky, the cane thrashing in the fields. When I didn't reply, she looked across the seat at me. "You listening?" "I took Tee Bobby's grandmother over the hurdles," I said. "She raised him. Maybe she should sit in her own shit for a change." "That's rough," I said. "No, Amanda Boudreau staring into the barrel of a shotgun is rough. There's a big difference between vies and perps, Streak. The victim is the victim. I wouldn't get the two confused." Helen always kept the lines simple. We crossed the freshwater bay onto the island. Waves were capping in the bay and hitting hard against the pilings under the bridge, slapping the shoreline and sliding up into the elephant ears along the shore. We rolled down the windows in the cruiser, and the light was cool and green inside the tunnel of trees as we drove toward Ladice's house. A tree limb cracked like a rifle shot overhead and spun crazily into the road ahead of us. Helen swerved around it. "I never liked this place," she said. "Why not?" I asked. Helen looked out the window at a black man trying to catch a horse that was running through a field of pepper plants while lightning forked the sky above the treeline. "If the LaSalles' ancestors had won the Civil War, I think the rest of us would be picking cotton for a living," she said. We parked in Ladice's yard and knocked on the door. Leaves were puffing out of the trees and blowing across the gallery and flattening against the screens. Inside, I could see Tee Bobby watching television in anoverstuffed chair, his chest caved in, his mouth open, his chin peppered with stubble. His grandmother came out of the kitchen and stood in silhouette behind his chair. "What you want?" she asked. "Need to take Tee Bobby into town and clarify a few things," I said. "What t'ings?" she asked. "We're looking at somebody else in the murder of Amanda Boudreau. Maybe it's time Tee Bobby did himself a good deed and starting cooperating with us," I said. Tee Bobby got up from his overstuffed chair and walked to the door, his long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned on his stomach, an unwashed odor wafting through the screen. "You looking at who?" he said. "This isn't a good place to talk. Call Mr. Perry and ask him what he wants you to do," I said, my face blank. "I ain't got to ax permission from Perry LaSalle to do nothing. I'll be back in a li'l while, Gran'mama. Right? Y'all gonna drive me back?" Tee Bobby said. "Right as rain," Helen said. That's the way you do it sometimes. Then you try to forget your own capacity for deceit.